made for RGe to participate in trade and innovation
shows in other regions of Brazil – from where the
company engaged in regional M&V actions and in
contacts with suppliers. Two months after consulting
with the PPL Centre, RGe’s CEO stated that “the
company is now better organized and production is
running more smoothly”. When answering
positively the RQ, he also indicated the “blended
services will have a long-lasting, positive
contribution to other MSEs in major PPL aspects”.
6 CONCLUSIONS
AND RECOMMENDATIONS
The main contribution of this position paper was the
proposal for blending training and consulting
services for effectively and economically dealing
with prototyping, production and logistics (PPL)
problems at micro and small enterprises (MSEs).
Blending is enacted here in the more traditional way
of blended learning (BL) which uses multimedia
delivery and also in mixing and complementing
training with consulting (and vice-versa) and
integrating that to information sharing and
infrastructure virtualization.
The proposal was investigated as to its adequacy
and usefulness to MSEs through a preliminary
validation effort. The results are encouraging and
albeit their little statistical significance, they suggest
that the research question may be answered
positively – i.e., that it is possible to specify and
provide a blend of training and consulting services
with support from BL-like infrastructure
virtualization to provide effective solutions to
MSEs’ PPL problems at low costs.
Upfront economy in executing designed
solutions (“use of additive manufacturing” for
instance) is made possible by fostering a community
of risk-seeking consultants and by sharing (possibly
through virtualization and renting) underutilized
PPL facilities from partners.
The proposed blended service approach seems
naturally more comfortable for clients, better
performing and more economical. In the case
studied, it was less costly (fewer trips and physical
meetings) and faster (no displacement overhead for
the involved consultants). We recommend it be tried
in incubator settings where MSEs have to be assisted
but have a small capacity to pay for services. On-
going work will further investigate the validity of
this recommendation.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
We thank executives in the investigation of section
3, all those in the initial validation campaign and
anonymous referees for their comments and
recommendations. This work is being sponsored by
the Brazilian Research Council (CNPq) under
contract No. 554373/2010-6.
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